Most of the world's agricultural extension services are funded and delivered by the public sector with the private sector contributing approximately 5%. The low private sector engagement in provision of agricultural extension may be attributed to poor enabling environment, which has deterred rather than encouraged private sector investment. Debates on engaging private sector in agricultural extension argue that private investment in extension is bound to generate agricultural productivity. Consequently, PPPs in agriculture are considered to be drivers for modernization of the sector.
This study examines whether agroecological farming practices, when employed by highly vulnerable households in sub-Saharan Africa, can improve food security and dietary diversity. The research involved a four-year study with 425 smallholder households, selected purposively based on high levels of food insecurity and/or positive HIV status. The households carried out agroecological experiments of their own choosing over a four-year period.
Local extension agents can benefit from the simple procedures in developing irrigation calendars for other irrigated crops. This study gives important lesson for local and regional decision makers, on their endeavour to increase the productivity of small scale irrigated agriculture. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the study area, practical irrigation schedule development method, alternative irrigation schedules and data collection and analysis methods. Section 3 presents the results.
The present rise of pork demand in Benin calls for an assessment of the swine value chain (VC) to envision its development. A participatory approach is here proposed to join this assessment to a stimulation of innovation among stakeholders.
This study was part of a larger project that applied an integrated framework for combined nutritional, food safety and value chain analysis to assess the dairy value chain in two regions of Tanzania, namely Morogoro and Tanga. Here, we report on the use of participatory rural appraisals (PRAs) with producers and consumers to investigate seasonality, constraints and opportunities in cow milk production and consumption in ten villages in Tanzania and describe attitudes and practices surrounding milk quality and safety.
Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas.
In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household.
The rise of new powers in development has generated much debate on the extent to which South–South Cooperation (SSC) constitutes a new paradigm of development more relevant to African needs or a disguise for a new form of imperialism. This paper critically examines the rise of Chinese and Brazilian technical and economic cooperation in African agriculture with two cases drawn from Ghana and Mozambique.
Agriculture Innovation System (AIS) thinking and approaches are largely perceived as a sine-qua-non for the design and implementation of effective and sustainable agriculture development programmes. AIS has gained popularity in the agriculture innovation literature and has been embedded in policy documents of agriculture sector institutions in many countries. However, there is much less evidence of AIS thinking influencing the behaviours of research and extension institutions and staff ‘on the ground’.
This study uses 344 women and men survey respondents involved in conservation agriculture (CA) and small-scale irrigation schemes (SSIS) as data sources for examining the effect of gendered constraints for adopting climate-smart agriculture amongst women in three areas in Ethiopia. Qualitative and quantitative data collections were applied using survey, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's chi-square test and binary logistic regression using statistical software for the social sciences (SPSS) version 24.